“If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but for those dreadful Hammers!” groaned John Ruskin to his friend Henry Acland in 1851. “I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses” (John Ruskin to Henry Acland, 24 May [1851], in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. [1903–1912], 24:115). If Victorian revelations about deep time have long been considered by scholars of science and secularization, developments in the study of human history also have generally been seen as inimical to orthodox Christianity. While new findings about ancient cultures destabilized the authority of the Bible, the careful picking apart of texts and artifacts was part of a demythologizing process that sapped the world of a providential sense of direction—or so it has often been assumed. Yet as Joshua Bennett argues in his elegant and wittily written God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845–1914, the scholarly mainstream of British historians was by no means materialist. Notions of progress required a sense that the sweep of human activity might be animated by “providential energies” that pointed to something beyond the material realm: “a world of ultimate realities” (8). This will not be news to readers of Duncan Forbes, Peter Hinchliff, or more recent authors on Anglo-German liberal Protestant scholarship, whose research has placed God (or at least Geist) at the center of the nineteenth-century effusion of writing about nations and their making. Bennett seeks, however, to push the revisionism further, insisting that the history of Christianity occupied a privileged place in progressive historical thinking, and that this in turn lent cultural authority to the practice of historicism.
His argument requires a reorientation of what were once received developmental canons. Largely eschewing Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Tübingen School, Bennett's essayists, historians, and divines are members of an ostensibly more traditional clerisy: Anglican clergymen such as brothers Augustus and Julius Hare, Henry Hart Milman, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and William Inge; Scots Presbyterians such as John Tulloch and John Caird; Prussian diplomat, man of letters, and Anglo-Lutheran go-between Baron Bunsen; and clergymen manqués such as the historians W. E. H. Lecky and James Anthony Froude. They did not comprise a school or group, although they were variously linked through friendship, attendance at the same universities, and mixing in similar social-intellectual circles. Connecting them was a broad conviction that the strife between faith and reason “rested upon a false antithesis” (34) because the stage for divine action was the world. Historical reflection was thus not just an aid to or a proxy for scholastic theology, but “inherent to determining ultimate value” (20). The irritant to which they were variously responding, Bennett suggests, was John Henry Newman. Since orthodox believers of all stripes in the early nineteenth century tended to assume that truth was fixed in self-authenticating scriptural texts or authoritative doctrinal formulae, Newman's conception of organic change over time as evidence of religious life, set out in his Essay on Development (1845), was deeply stimulating. Yet Newman's conclusions were also dismaying: “Whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays,” he declaimed, “at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this” (John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine [1845; 7th ed., 1890], 7).
Liberal Protestant answers to the same sort of questions, Bennett explains, fell into two broad camps. One was the wry liberal Anglicanism of deans Milman and Stanley, rooted in eighteenth-century latitudinarianism, which viewed the so-called errors and doctrinal dead-ends of the past in detached, benevolently cynical terms, seeing in the mutability of Christianity evidence of its truth, but regarding it as something that could be discerned only at a distance and with sympathy for what was best on both sides of any controverted question. The other camp was more strongly influenced by Idealism, as Schleiermacher's pietism and psychology, J. A. W. Neander's historical study of Christianity as a progressive force, and later Albrecht Ritschl's New Testament history diffused Kantian and Hegelian ideas into British thought. Bennett traces the debates around these ideas through chapters titled “The Early Church,” “Latin Christianity,” “Reformation Protestantism,” and “Reason and Religion in Modern History”—that is, understandings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rational Protestantism. The mood evoked throughout is of confidence and creativity: “Positive reconstruction . . . best describes what Victorian religious historians believed they were accomplishing” (245). It was history, not dogma or the Bible, that would persuade free individuals to recognize the superiority of a broadly conceived Christianity.
This is, then, a nicely ambitious book, densely but clearly and stylishly argued. Now and again, Bennett is given to the occasional grandiloquent claim on its behalf. “By illustrating how sequestered dons and comfortable clergy inhabited a discursive continuum with popular preachers and jobbing journalists,” he declares, “it demonstrates that higher-level intellectual and scholarly developments drew energy from and galvanized wider attitudinal changes among more middlebrow Victorians” (5). What follows is certainly engaged in consideration of journals, lectures, and sermons alongside the foundation of new professorial chairs, but it feels more like a delineation of the mind of an intellectual culture, along the lines, say, of Stefan Collini's Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (1991). Most of all, it resembles James Kirby's Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (2016), whose skillful anatomization of a related but separate milieu, that of the high churchmen who constructed history as an academic discipline in the English universities, similarly put religion at the center of intellectual and professional endeavors in the late Victorian period. Bennett's book, likewise, carries complete conviction, and justifiably so. It is therefore a slight shame that his book—like Kirby's—ends allusively rather than decisively, with the impetus of religious history receding. Religious philosophers, the reader is told, took up the baton instead, focusing on psychology and the problem of mind as places where one might discern God. No doubt this has something to do with the tight word limits imposed by the Oxford Historical Monographs series; and it might also simply be true that the religious progressive historical tradition ended more with a whimper than a bang. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to hear more about whether this was part of secularization or just shifting scholarly fashion.
